To-Do List: Deficits, Dingoes, and Two-Headed Trout

To know: The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that plans offered by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum would produce massive deficits … Maryland’s Senate passed a same-sex marriage bill, which the state’s governor will sign … Bill Maher announced that he’ll donate a million dollars to the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA Action … The U.S. Postal Service may cut thirty-five thousand jobs … A new inquest is being held to look into the question of whether a dingo really did eat an Australian baby in a famous case from thirty years ago.

Photographs of variously mutated brown trout were relegated to an appendix of a scientific study commissioned by the J. R. Simplot Company, whose mining operations have polluted nearby creeks in southern Idaho. The trout were the offspring of local fish caught in the wild that had been spawned in the laboratory. Some had two heads; others had facial, fin and egg deformities.

Yet the company’s report concluded that it would be safe to allow selenium—a metal byproduct of mining that is toxic to fish and birds—to remain in area creeks at higher levels than are now permitted under regulatory guidelines. The company is seeking a judgment to that effect from the Environmental Protection Agency. After receiving a draft report that ran hundreds of pages, an E.P.A. review described the research as “comprehensive” and seemed open to its findings, which supported the selenium variance for Simplot’s Smoky Canyon mine.

But when other federal scientists and some environmentalists learned of the two-headed brown trout, they raised a ruckus, which resulted in further scientific review that found the company’s research wanting.

The Associated Press examines the results of the N.Y.P.D.’s spying on Muslim groups and institutions:

“Under Commissioner Ray Kelly’s leadership, at least 14 attacks by Islamic terrorists have been prevented by the NYPD,” Republican Rep. Peter King has said.

But a closer review of the cases reveals a more complicated story.

The list cited by King includes plans that may never have existed, as well as plots the NYPD had little or no hand in disrupting. According to a review of public documents, materials obtained by the AP and interviews with dozens of city and federal officials, the most controversial NYPD spying programs produced mixed results.

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.